I’m not sure how anyone could be saying it might not break a billion. They’d have to pull it from theaters to accomplish that.
DrDre said:
but given the recent history, and Abrams’ reputation, I don’t think many people expected a masterpiece. Hence, this outcome was not all that suprising to some of us.
If you look at the Tomatoemeter (i.e. the only “review” that matters for the vast majority of the audience), TROS has 53%, which is a massive drop off from the next lowest rated Abrams film (Mission: Impossible III, which also disappointed). Regardless of your personal feelings on TFA, that film was a mostly unanimous success, with a 93% rating. That’s a very significant difference from TROS.
There’s a difference between not getting overwhelmingly positive reviews and getting bad reviews. 53% is far outside the realm of what people have come to expect from things like Star Wars and Marvel. Even the flop Solo had a 70%.
Which is why I’m saying I don’t think those early projections would look accurate now had the film not done its damndest to turn off the general audience, which was a factor I don’t think anyone making those projections was accounting for.
Exactly. We probably should have included RT predictions alongside our BO guesses. But then again, I personally would never have guessed there was the possibility it would score this low (fool I am, I probably would have predicted high 80s, low 90s). If you had told me ahead of time it would have 53% I would have guessed a much lower number (and in fact I believe I said as much when the tomatometer was revealed).